What is Collaboration Marketing: Community, Communication and Collaboration

It was an honor to be able to present to many executives in NYC a few weeks ago and thought I would take the next few posts to share some of the slides and talking points. So, what is collaboration marketing? In it’s most basic form I see it as the intersection of connecting the consumer/buyer via community content, engaging in transparent communication in order to feed into the “builder” of the product to deliver an improved customer experience.

Community, Communication and Collaboration Marketing

Ultimately, driving more sales via brand advocacy.

However, as we shared our stories with each other I saw an opportunity and potential convergence of front line customer experience and online collaboration. It seems that many companies still keep these two functions very separate when they both share the same objective. One, is customer engagement via traditional call center engagement and two is the advocacy and digital marketing of customer experience. The goal for both is to deliver a quality customer experience and build brand advocacy but the functions themselves usually reside in two different departments with separate strategies and operating budgets. Imagine if you were able to connect the entire end-to-end experience from the customers first touch point with a full cycle of engagement.

It is pretty simple but much more complex to rollout to an organization because it touches and requires the engagement of multiple departments. It was interesting to see the nodding heads of those that could relate as I was telling the story. And it became pretty clear that we all start at the same place at some point in time. For me it was almost 4 years ago. I had no budget, two resources and confusion on where engagement marketing belongs. Was it part of communications, digital, customer service? This isn’t uncommon and in hindsight it really doesn’t matter where the function is located. The only thing that matters is if you can bring the stakeholders together and deliver. So, we started executing on what we had control over. And it all started with clearly defining three simple objectives and getting everyone’s buy in on just those three.

About bracerennelsExperience assisting companies implement disruptive engagement marketing strategies to evolve community, collaboration and corporate communications. Provide strategic and executive leadership to transform traditional marketing programs into modern social engagement and improved customer experience. Currently scheduled to speak at the Argyle Executive Forum NYC Nov 5th and will entertain other speaking, advisory or consulting opportunities as time allows.